A Good Start for the Awards Season

This has been a pretty good little stretch here for award nominations and wins. My partner in Valley Business FRONT and I were just informed we are winners of the first Arts Council of the Blue Ridge Perry F. Kendig Literary Award (I picked up one of those a few years ago for the Blue Ridge Business Journal, just the second publication in the region to win one at the time) and this morning I got word from the NewVa Corridor Technology Council that I'm nominated for a Technology Entrepreneur Award. I'm not certain that a publication in this region has ever won an NCTC award.

Finally, for the third year in a row, I was nominated for Virginia Commonwealth University's Communications Hall of Fame (didn't make it again, bringing thoughts of Susan Lucci to mind, as it has each time I've been nominated for the Roanoke Regional Chamber's Business Advocate of the Year Award--that'd be four).

Anyhow, awards are valuable for a new venture like ours because it gives us a little street cred when the awards are voted upon by people we deal with in business. Journalism awards, on the other hand, can be dangerous, in my mind, and we don't even enter those contests any longer (my guess is that we'd sweep our categories in a variety of contests). There is always the possibility that the motive in writing stories is to win awards when we enter competitions and the Virginia Press Association has had a couple of incidents of overt cheating in recent years that I find despicable.